Posts tagged ‘Zadie Smith’

Paperback now available – £8.99

Hoping to read Tenth of December by George Saunders in a handy paperback format on 10 December, 2013? Well, if you call at the Riverside you can indeed enjoy this moment of literary synchronicity; or at the very least get hold of this acclaimed collection before all your well-read friends. We’re happy to report that the publisher has supplied us with the paperback edition ahead of its official January 2014 release date. Given the half-dozen mentions for Tenth of December in the end-of-year newspaper round-ups, it means we can satisfy the many curious readers who’ll be seeking out George Saunders this month. The hardback has slipped out of print and a certain retailer, perhaps distracted by developing its drone technology, is still listing the Tenth of December paperback as being on sale on 2 January, 2014.

Frankly, you can’t wait until then for this book, which has cemented Saunders’s reputation as the finest American writer of short stories at work today. Saunders can be funny, surreal, bleak and humane on the same page. Take his 1998 story Sea Oak which features a male stripper who’s working in an aviation-themed restaurant, while also trying to deal with the reanimated corpse of his Aunt Bernie and her concerted efforts to restore the American Dream for her penurious family.

Saunders’s Royal Festival Hall event this summer ended up being a master class about one particular story he read from (Victory Lap, which opens the new collection) that had nascent authors in the audience scribbling away feverishly. George made it look easy, but it’s really not. As Zadie Smith puts it on the cover of the paperback edition – did we mention it’s already on our shelves? – of Tenth of December: “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny with a prose style this fine.”

We can help with all your summer reading requirements – and we’ve got £2 off dozens of selected paperback titles in fiction and non-fiction including novels by Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and A.M. Homes. The £2 discount applies while stocks last – and we’ll be adding new titles to our Summer Reading so come and have a browse. Click on the book covers below to view a gallery of just some of the books on offer.

The once-a-decade edition of Granta that names the 20 best British writers under 40 has been all over the media, as you’d expect from a list which launched in 1983 and has previously featured Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson, Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters and Zadie Smith (who gets a second nod in 2013, along with Adam Thirlwell.) Congratulations to this year’s anointed authors (particularly fellow south London bookseller Evie Wyld) in the fourth edition of this literary landmark. We’ve got the new Granta (issue 123) in stock as well as a selection of novels by the 2013 intake – click on the book covers below to view the gallery.

The shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced and we’ve got all this year’s contenders available at the Riverside – including new paperback editions of the novels by A. M. Homes and Barbara Kingsolver. It’s a strong shortlist – both Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver are previous winners – so Hilary Mantel has a fight on her hands if she’s going to do the treble and add this prize to her Man Booker and Costa for Bring Up the Bodies.

If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of this particular prize in what’s become an increasingly crowded market for literary contests, that’s because you probably got used to calling it the Orange Prize for Fiction (the sponsor pulled out last year). We’ve also got previous winners in stock including last year’s The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht from 2011.

New issues out now – £12.99

Object Lessons, the superlative collection of short stories from The Paris Review, was a literary hit over Christmas. For anyone enraptured by that anthology of favourites from the New York magazine’s 60-year history, the obvious next step is to acquire a quarterly habit for The Paris Review’s inventive fiction, poetry and prose from international authors. Issue 203 features new fiction and poetry from James Salter, Rachel Kushner, Sarah Frisch, Tim Parks, Peter Orner, Ben Lerner and Geoffrey Hill, as well as Pulphead essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan and editor Lorin Stein’s interviews from the First Annual Norwegian-American Literary Festival.

British literary magazine Granta, which features award-winning reportage, memoir, fiction and photography, will be making headlines in the spring when it publishes its once-a-decade list of the best of young British novelists. In 2003, their literary roll call included David Mitchell, Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. The latest issue, no. 122, has the stinging theme of betrayal with new writing by Ben Marcus, Janine di Giovanni, Karen Russell, Samantha Harvey, Colin Robinson and John Burnside.